


stark reality

by bitchiago



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:20:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27254836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bitchiago/pseuds/bitchiago
Summary: eddie kaspbrak is drawn as a tribute for the annual hunger games. enter sonia kaspbrak screaming the district down
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	stark reality

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I've never posted on here before but I'm a massive lurker. Eddie K has my heart and so does the way Stephen King approaches characters through other characters, so this Sonia centric thing was born.
> 
> Alternatively, I was given a prompt in class a few months back for a ten minute exercise to put one of our favourite characters into one of our favourite worlds. Eddie Kaspbrak and The Hunger Games forever own my brain no matter how many years pass. I took the exercise too seriously and kept going. 
> 
> It's rambly and more character explorationy than anything, but it was fun (~: Enjoy!

Sonia smoothed down the ends of Eddie’s collar. She was nervous, more nervous than him, it seemed. She hadn’t expected this, you see. Neither of them had. 

Her son couldn’t run as fast as other children; he was sensitive, he didn’t have a fighting chance, and that’s exactly what he needed. He wasn’t like that, her Eddie, no, no. And she wouldn’t be able to protect him from this. Not like when he was being picked on by the neighbour’s dog down the street who somehow knew Eddie was the weakest link and wouldn’t let him home from the bakery with all the bread still intact and he would come home weeping and apologising with empty arms. She couldn’t smack the nasty kids down like she did that dog when he would enter the arena, when those nasty bells would go off and the countdown would begin. She couldn’t protect him from the screaming watchers, glued to their screens and counting their coins, betting on her son’s ability to knock down another child and plunge a knife into them again and again as the life force drained out of them. Not her Eddie. Her Eddie couldn’t cross the road without choking up and gasping for air. 

Her Eddie was sensitive, he was kind. He couldn’t do something like that–no, he wouldn’t. He would sooner be knocked down and a foot would land on his chest and tear straight through the skin, right through his ribs and crackling lungs, and that would be the end of her Eddie. A lover not a fighter who would sooner come to his young end than hurt a hair on someone else’s head, even if his life depended on it.

‘You’ll have to try, Eddie bear. You’ll have to or else I don’t know what I’ll do.’

Eddie nodded, his eyes brimming with tears. He wouldn’t know to do without her either. He never had been without her, and he had never quite thought about it. He didn’t dare to, for he knew he wouldn’t like the thought and knew that deep down, entertaining the idea would send him into such a panic and give him such a fright, that he surely wouldn’t recover from it. His mother wouldn’t be there to protect him, not this time, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with that. 

‘I’ll try,’ he said, but he wasn’t quite yet sure if he believed it himself. He had woken up that morning with the assurance from his mother that she would never let him be picked. That if that woman pulled his name out of the sea of papers, she simply wouldn’t have it. His name was only in their once and that he would be excused, surely – his ill health was enough of a reason. And if they wouldn’t listen, she would simply take him home with her anyway and they would have to choose someone else – because that boy in your class, you know the one, with those glasses and the messy hair, he deserves it much more, or that other boy, the one with the curly hair, oh, you know the one – that they would not be taking Eddie Kaspbrak away from his mother for such a stupid reason, because she needed him and he needed her. It had only now dawned on the two of them what a stupid tale it was to tell themselves.

They stood in the Justice Building, however, unsure of what to do with their last few moments together, at perhaps the last time Eddie Kaspbrak would ever see his mother again. She would see him again, there was no doubt about that – his face was ready to be plastered up on screen along the other unfortunate twenty-three souls who were preparing to rip him limb from limb in front of everyone as Sonia was forced to watch in horror. 

Sonia nodded and forced a tight-lipped smile out, grabbed a hold of his arm and squeezed hard, all too aware that there was not a single soul in the world to turn to once she was sent out from this room and Eddie was forced onto that damned train ready for the world to tear him apart for sport.

‘Smile for your mommy out there, Eddie. I’ll be watching you.’

The door behind them creaked open and a peacekeeper entered. Sonia looked desperately between him and her sweet boy and all of a sudden, it hit her. It really hit her and her roars started. Eddie could have sworn he saw walls of the justice building starting to crumble around them. 

‘Oh, Eddie! Not my Eddie!’ she wailed. 

The peacekeeper took Sonia Kaspbrak by the arm and started leading her out of the room away from her son.

Eddie Kaspbrak was, at his best, hopelessly optimistic; at worst, totally consumed my the assurity of his mother's equally as hopeless words. A belief still hovered inside of him that he really would be excused and sent home in his ma's arms for the nature of his person. That even if they weren't to excuse him, she was soon to storm back into the room anyway, push past the guards and swoop him back up into her arms and carry him off somewhere he would be safe again.

Eddie couldn’t summon the breath he needed to speak out to her. Not to tell her that he was sure he could squirm out of the way of a peacekeeper and make the jump from the window to the ground if she told him he should, that they could run for the hills together and he wouldn't say another word about it as long as they were together. Not to even utter a goodbye. Instead, he watched on as his mother cried and screamed and the walls of the building continued to shake as she was dragged out. 

The moment the door shut behind her and the muffled screams became more and more distant, travelled further and further, floating away from Eddie's brain as if they were never there, was the second the storybook belief wavered in him. That he thought that maybe, just maybe, his mother wasn't able to protect him.


End file.
